“One of the tests for determining if the work of salvation in your life is genuine is — has God changed the things that really matter to you? If you still yearn for the old things, it is absurd to talk about being born from above — you are deceiving yourself.”
— Oswald Chambers, from “My Utmost for His Highest” entry for Nov. 12
The New Year is a good time to wonder if we’re still yearning for “the old things.”
To be well regarded is a basic human desire — and an “old thing” for which I yearned, perhaps with a slightly wrong motive, for many years.
It took me a long time to realize — to admit to myself — that I was not to have literary riches or fame. I was not to be a mother or wife. I was to remain (joyfully as it transpires) celibate.
All that I could accept, most days. Still I yearned for social status. Let me be “popular” within my recovery circle, among my neighbors, on social media.
In the course of the yearning, I learned that we’re called to put out to the world what we can and what we’re moved to, simply as a spontaneous desire to share the love of Christ.
I have to make every effort to participate, to be useful, to contribute — and to accept, as we all must, that a lot of my actions and work don’t seem to much avail.
Then again, over time I’ve been given new eyes to see what “avails.” I hear from a few people each week who say that my work has consoled, inspired, accompanied, comforted, challenged, or — best of all — made them laugh.
That has come to be enough: enough and then some. Other gifts of my station in life include an ever-deepening prayer life, freedom from the bondage of self, and a lively sense of adventure.
Letting go of old things and “putting on the new” invites us to see poverty as riches, cross as crown.
The conscripted austerity of the single layperson, to take just one example (and we all have our version of austerity), enables us more fully to enter through the “narrow gate.”
Those of us without the support of a believing family, a lay movement, or an order, learn over time to want more to give a good account of ourselves to God than to cultivate an image in front of our friends, family, public, or peers.
When our spiritual well-being is all we have, we may be more prone to examine our conscience, to admit our sins and mistakes, to make amends when we’re wrong, to extend the olive branch of peace and then let the results go.
In “The Joy of Believing” (Sophia Institute Press, $19.95), French author and lover of the poor Madeleine Delbrêl observed:
“Unbelievers can love others with a magnificent love. But we haven’t been called to this kind of loving. It is not our love that we have to offer, it is the love of God. … Supernatural love has to be Jesus’ kind of love; that is to say it has to be incarnate and redemptive. This is not a spiritual love but a love in the flesh (see the parable about the Last Judgment). It does not give happiness but ‘buys into’ the beatitudes. This love becomes a goal that is impossible for us to reach when it is spiritualized, when it is so to speak ‘unfleshed’ from our humanity and no longer attends to genuine human needs.”
Whether we tend more to the active or to the contemplative life, we have to bring our body to this supernatural kind of love. Marriage is one way of bringing the body; celibacy is another. Both, if done intentionally, consciously, and sacramentally, are a laying down of our lives for our friends.
Lest those of us drawn to prayer lapse into abstraction, Delbrêl reminds us that we’re called to bring our minds, souls, and strength to the person in front of us — to be present, to pay attention, to continually stretch ourselves way beyond our comfort zones.
We don’t get to sequester ourselves from the Other, whoever the Other may be to us. And we need to back up our prayer with “work” of one kind or another that is more than writing a check or having an opinion. “Ora et labora,” as the monks say: prayer and work.
This idea of bringing our bodies is one reason I love walking. I often walk to Mass, when I could drive, maybe a half-hour each way, as a conscious offering of all that I am.
Having fasted for an hour before, what with the half-hour walk there, Mass, and the walk back, I’m usually somewhat hungry the whole time. This is one example of the kind of very gentle, very rudimentary offering that we can make throughout our day.
The point being that my life becomes ever more of a piece. I don’t have to separate times of prayer, times of “work;” times when I’m “contributing,” times when I’m “sacrificing.” Times when I’m conscious of Christ, times when I’m not. It’s all work and it’s all prayer, and the things that really matter to me ever evolve, ever new.
I wish you all a rich and blessed 2026.
